"Our expectation is that mobile-device users will switch to the mobile site for fast access to information," said Jeff Wood, director of web communications.

"In the near term, our stcloudstate.edu website will remain the flagship provider of university news and information," said Loren Boone, assistant vice president of marketing and communications. "Down the road, we may see the lines between mobile and traditional websites blur in the same way tablet devices have blurred the lines between hand-held and desktop computers."

St. Cloud State is among the 5 percent of American colleges and universities that have mobile websites, according to Boone.

Dave Olsen, publisher of the Mobile in Higher Ed website, says more than 160 American colleges and universities have mobile websites. Olsen is a programmer/project manager at West Virginia University in Morgantown.

The U.S. has nearly 3,000 four-year colleges and universities, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a federal agency in the Department of Education.

The mobile site is part of a larger mobile-communication effort that began in February with the launch of the St. Cloud State University Tour application. The free application is available on devices using the iOS 4.0 and newer operating system and the Android 1.5 and newer operating system.

In February 2011, more than 90 percent of the mobile visitors to stcloudstate.edu used devices running Apple's iOs or Google's Android operating systems.